…or maybe not…

My understanding is that blue badge folks who are trying to move internally are finding positions that they are doing informationals for are abruptly disappearing once HR realizes somebody is seriously considering the job – this is a rather cunning strategy to minimize alarm ‘Sure we are hiring, look at all these jobs!’.

And I know an orange badge who had a 90 day that lasted 90 days instead of doing the continual rolling update of years past.

(I feel my bozo bit starting to go bistable, so off i go…)

I believe the pain of unwinding multiple fiascos (great plains, msn, ) was baked into the current RIF and the further opportunities for pissing money away (starts with a Y…) have been walked away from.

Note further that microsoft has not really bought anything lately, last thing was powerset and that was pretty much chump change (tho i am sure the powerset folks feel pretty good).

ON the OS front….

M$FT:

Win7′s deploys a powerful technology called Failure to Appear to Completely Suck from the Get Go, and that really counts for something.

I doubt seriously that they expect to make money on retail SKU’s, i think the day whenfolks did their own upgrades are over and done with.

GOGL:

Fucking ChromeOS. It’s very difficult to see the value proposition. What am i missing here?

I was kinda enthused by the fact that the original EEPC’s ran something ubuntu-ish. But that appears to be the highwater for market penetration and the tide has rushed out pretty dramatically from there.

To pontificate; it appears that google has reached that fork in the road where the finance team has done the revenue projections and says:

‘We need to diversify, what else have you got?’.

M$FT hit that around 95-6 and thus we ended up with diversifying via Plan A (Copy Palm) and Plan B (Copy Nintendo). Execution of Plan A plus a smattering of Plan B (The foolish people at SEGA taught M$FT everything they knew about how to make a game console in order to have the DreamCast run WinCE) was what allowed myself and approximately 500 other souls (including many DEC refugee’s that you still probably hang out with) to be employed at BSQUARE.

Then you can add hotmail, MSN, Great Plains, MSNBC and what ever the heck else as Plans C,D, E, etc…..

As for google? The mighty combined brain power of google comes up with ‘hey, let’s copy Debby and Ian!’ and then they say ‘We’ll attach it to a cloud! with Social Networking! and Ruby! and sell keywords! the network will *be* the computer!’ (and then the google equivalent of cary fujii will say ‘i don’t think you want to say that last bit.’)’

I will allow the folks at google the courtesy of a wait and see, but on the surface this seems super mundane and unbrilliant (guess i wont be getting any interviews there any time soon!).

So my crappy and scratched recycled crystal ball indicates continuation of the status quo, only at a much less fiscally satisfying level for ourselves and our peers and for the hardworking college kids that thought that engineering internships actually paid pretty good money.